In furtherance of al‑Shāfiʿī’s project of grounding the canon of law in the canon of revelation, legal theorists of the 3d/9th and 4th/10th centuries formulated several theoretical models of how divine speech might function as the epistemological basis of law. The Ashʿarī model seemed to leave meaning underdetermined; the Muʿtazilī model was minimalist and surprisingly literalist; and both models treated God’s speech as indicative evidence from which God’s law must be deduced through a rational process. In opposition to these theologically inspired hermeneutical theories, jurists from across the major schools formulated a more pragmatic set of interpretive principles that was at once powerful and flexible. Their interpretive rules tended to maximize the legal significance of revelation by ascribing maximum force to commands, by giving wide scope to general expressions, and by discerning as much implicit meaning as they reasonably could behind the explicit dictates of revelation. At the same time, they sought to maintain the flexibility needed for resolving contradictions by refusing to restrict which texts could be used to clarify which other texts, and by formulating a classification of ambiguity that justified the practice of substituting alternative literal meanings for the default interpretations prescribed by their own rules. This approach was epitomized in the legal hermeneutics of the Ḥanbalī Abū Yaʿlā, who justified it in terms of his traditionalist, almost anthropomorphic theory of God’s eternal yet immanent speech: God’s speech is an eternal and universal speech act, addressed to all humanity through both the Qurʾān and the Prophet’s Sunna, bringing about obligations in the hearts of God’s servants immediately and performatively, without the intermediary process of ratiocination required by the theologians’ models. This conflation of law with revelation paved the way for the intuitivism of Ibn Taymiyya, and for those modern legal interpretations that are often mislabeled as literalist.

At the 2005 American Academy of Religion meeting, while interviewing for jobs, I finally found a way to present the gist of my main research project, The Formation of Islamic Hermeneutics, in a way that would engage a general religious studies audience (with the help of a few props).

“Medieval Islamic Models of Revelation: Hermeneutical Consequences Then and Now.” American Academy of Religion, Philadelphia, November 21, 2005.

Medieval Muslim jurists’ competing interpretive theories embodied profoundly different visions of law, revelation, and the relationship between them. The Zahiri Ibn Hazm envisioned law as a language game, in which the details of the law unfold like theorems from God’s axiomatic utterances. The Mu`tazili `Abd al-Jabbar pictured revelation as a signpost erected by God in the midst of creation, indicating the consequences of human actions in plain speech. The Ash`ari al-Baqillani regarded the words of revelation as dim and partial indicators from which human beings may infer the content of God’s eternal, inscrutable command. The Hanbali Abu Ya`la portrayed revelation anthropomorphically, likening it to a human ruler’s speech that brings about obligations performatively. Many of the fundamental questions about language and meaning addressed by these medieval models remain contested in contemporary Islamic hermeneutical discourse, where they now have the potential to generate dramatic changes in interpretation and law.

My dissertation was completed in 2004 at Emory University under the guidance of my advisor Richard Martin, Gordon Newby, Devin Stewart, and Vernon Robbins. It has now been superseded by my much more comprehensive book The Formation of Islamic Hermeneutics, but a few scholars may still find value in the more extensive documentation the dissertation provides in some long footnotes.

Here is a pdf of the dissertation, which I believe still accurately reflects the formatting and layout of the original. A scanned copy of the original, made by University Microfilms International, is available through many libraries or directly from Proquest here.

Despite several important studies, the structure and composition of al‑Shāfiʿī’s Risāla, and its relation to subsequent legal theory, remain a puzzle. Several scholars have been driven to reorder the text or posit multiple stages of redaction in the late 3d/9th century. Its reputation as the founding text of Islamic legal theory has been rightly called into question.

The difficulties presented by the text may be substantially alleviated if it is read as a sequence of three related but distinct parts, each with its own thesis and internal organization. These parts are distinguished by formal characteristics as well as content. Part 1 (through ¶568) seeks to demonstrate that the Qurʾān is a clear, consistent, and comprehensive statement of the law, by using the Prophetic Sunna and analogy to elaborate on summary Qurʾānic injunctions, and by exploiting the many ambiguities of Arabic to reconcile conflicting texts. Part 2 (¶569-960) shows how to resolve conflicting traditions within the Prophetic Sunna, principally by exploiting linguistic ambiguities. Part 3 (¶961-1821) gives procedures for arriving at formally correct rulings when, even with the aid of the well-established Sunna, the Qurʾān does not yield definite answers to legal questions.

When read in this way, the text as it now stands appears sufficiently coherent to represent the minimally edited lectures of a single scholar, possibly al‑Shāfiʿī. Furthermore, although the Risāla does not display the same structure as later legal theory manuals, it does introduce both the major hermeneutical problem of legal theory (the correlation of law with revelation) and the classical solution to that problem (the analysis of linguistic ambiguity.) This contribution was not ignored, but on the contrary was disputed and elaborated already during the 3d/9th century. This paper thus reaffirms but also redescribes the central role of the Risāla in the development of Islamic legal theory.

My very first national conference presentation was given in the warm, congenial, and supportive setting of the American Oriental Society meeting in 2002. I presented highlights of the first chapter I wrote for my dissertation, which eventually became Chapter 5 of The Formation of Islamic Hermeneutics:

al‑Bāqillānī constructs his interpretive theory around the ambiguity of the language of revelation. He consistently maintains that a revealed expression may be interpreted only in accordance with established Arabic usage, but if it has more than one possible literal meaning, one must suspend interpretive judgment. For example, he argues that without additional evidence one cannot decide whether or not an imperative expresses a command; whether a command entails an obligation or a recommendation; whether an utterance means one or more than one of its possible meanings; whether an expression that could be general is intended as general or particular; or whether a particular text modifies a general text.

This systematic defense of ambiguity supports the hermeneutical vision embodied in al‑Shāfiʿī’s Risāla. Recent scholarship on the Risāla has studied its attempt to reconcile the law with the Qurʾān and Prophetic Sunna, but has failed to identify its key methodological tool: the systematic exploitation of the ambiguity of the Arabic language, which allows interpreters to reconcile divergent texts into a coherent legal system. al‑Bāqillānī’s Taqrīb provides the theological underpinnings for this hermeneutics of ambiguity. He argues his case for the indeterminacy of meaning by appealing to the Ashʿarī doctrine that God’s speech is an eternal attribute (maʿná), of which the words of revelation are a created expression (ʿibāra). He uses this separation between maʿná and ʿibāra to create an interpretive space between verbal forms and the meanings they express. His work therefore represents a justification of the Shāfiʿī vision of legal theory on the basis of Ashʿarī theology.